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Mitch Resnick and Jane Krauss at NECC 2009 |
Greetings from NECC 2009!
by Katie Ertz
July 1, 2009
Greetings from NECC 2009, Partner Booth 0018!
NCWIT’s K-12 Alliance has produced another outstanding kit of computing resources to help educators spark interest of girls in computing, called Gotta Have IT, and Monday was our first day distributing them at NECC. For 2009, we have a special bonus: ISTE will host a “Gotta Have IT” webinar on Tuesday, October 20th for all recipients of this year’s kits. We have been busy scanning as many conference badges as possible (despite a broken scanner Monday afternoon) so that we can invite people to the webinar, and include them in our evaluation later in the 2009-10 school year.
We have a beautiful “double-wide” partner booth immediately next to session room 147A, on the north side of the “L” street entrance, and we brought 4,000 kits to hand out (FREE), so we hope that everyone will spread the word and stop by for a visit.
A couple of us decided to stay a bit late on Monday, and our extra efforts paid off with a visit from Mitchel Resnick of MIT Media Lab, who developed Scratch, a programming language for kids. Jane had her camera handy, and the picture is truly a “rock star” moment!
We have had extremely positive feedback on this year’s kit, and we still have more to hand out. Our mission is to put these valuable resources into the hands of educators who can make the best use of them. If you weren't able to pick up a kit in person, please visit www.ncwit.org/ghit to download the resources.
Tags:
Education
Gender
NCWIT
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BPC/NCWIT K-12 Outreach Workshop
by Dr. Amy Sharma
AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, National Science Foundation
June 30, 2009
I want to thank all the people that presented and
attended the recent NCWIT/BPC K-12 Outreach Workshop in Washington, D.C. this month.
From what I hear and what I saw, it was a smashing success. BPC and NCWIT are working hard to get good programs to "where the students are," and I hope this workshop helped us all take a step in
that direction.
At this workshop, several of our wonderful BPC Principal Investigators (PIs) were able
to share their success stories. We are proud of how well their programs are
doing. At the same time, several national organizations (Girl
Scouts, 4-H, Girls Inc., Citizen Schools, Boys & Girls Clubs, MESA), which together reach a huge proportion of K-12 youth in the U.S., shared their
mission and goals. This should help our PIs learn how to spread their successful
interventions and ideas along existing national networks. I, for one, was
excited to learn that 4-H isn’t just about the state fair – it exists to help
kids learn about new technology.
Our keynote speakers were dynamic and inspiring. Citizen Schools President and CEO Eric Schwarz educated us on how average citizens, who care about their schools, can help to
make a difference and really enhance the school day. Citizen Schools is the
type of "disruptive technology" that can virally change the landscape of
education – making science learning interactive and fun.
Speaking of fun: we were treated to an
entertaining discussion by Dr. Tim Bell, one of the creators of CS Unplugged. Not only did he bring
squishy fruit and conduct binary magic tricks – assisted by the talented Dr.
Tom Cortina – but he reminded us how much fun computing can be and how even elementary
school student can be awed by, and understand, the simple magic of computing.
I hope everyone learned as much as, if not more than, I did. I
hope connections where made that are followed-up on. And I hope to hear about everyone’s
continued success in the future.
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Education
NCWIT
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Update from the NCWIT Meetings
by Barb Ericson
May 21, 2009
I just attended the May Meetings of the National Center for Women in
Information Technology (NCWIT). NCWIT is now five years old. The
organization has two main goals: to increase the number of girls and
women in computing and to make diversity in computing matter to
individuals, organizations, and society.
The meeting had some wonderful talks. We heard from Vivian Lagesen,
who is researching why some countries, such as Malaysia, have a much
higher percentage of women in computing than we do in western
countries. She found several important differences.
- The government ran a campaign to encourage women to enter computing fields.
- The parents encourage the girls to enter computing fields.
- The field is not considered to be a "male" field.
She said that the women in Malaysia found it very hard to
believe that computing is considered male in western cultures. They
couldn't see why it would be perceived that way since you work indoors
and sit. Roli Varma also told of research in India which shows that
women there think of computing as a lucrative and female-friendly
field. People who are in the field in India are considered to be smart
and social.
Several speakers described projects that help the developing world.
Bernadine Dias, the founder of TechBridgeWorld at CMU described the
development of a low-cost digital device for blind kids to practice
writing in Braille. It was very inspirational.
Joi Spencer talked about an intensive study into the differences
between math education in the United States and other higher performing
nations. One of the biggest differences was in how we teach math to
students. In Japan for example the students are introduced to a new
mathematical concept by leaning about a complex problem that they are
asked to solve. The students spend many days thinking about the problem
and trying to solve it in different ways. Then they might learn a new
procedure for solving the problem. In the United States we first teach
students the procedure for solving problems and have them practice but
we rarely ask them to use it to solve a complex problem. Kids in the
United States are also often taught that there is only one way to solve
a problem. My own daughter, for example, gets mad at me when I try to
show her more than one way to solve a math problem. She says, "the
teacher wants us to do it this way."
NCWIT has also produced many high-quality materials for teachers and
parents. The Talking Points card, for example, provides suggestions and
information for family members who want to talk to girls about
computing. NCWIT also evaluates techniques for introducing girls to
computing and has identified promising practices such as CS Unplugged,
Scratch, Alice, and Media Computation. You might want to show your
students some of the slides from some of the talks from this last
meeting. You can download these resources and more from www.ncwit.org.
Barb Ericson is a CSTA Board Member and co-chair of the NCWIT K-12 Alliance. This is a cross-posting from the Computer Science Teacher's Association (CSTA) blog, located at http://blog.acm.org/csta/. She is also Director of CS Outreach at the Georgia Tech College of Computing.
Tags:
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Gender
NCWIT
Work
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NCWIT Symons Innovator Award Wordle |
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Allison Bozeman of Bird Dog Press |
NCWIT Symons Innovator Award
by NCWIT Staff
May 8, 2009
Please join us in congratulating the winner of the first annual NCWIT
Symons Innovator Award, Anousheh Ansari.
The NCWIT Symons Innovator Award honors an outstanding woman who has
successfully grown and funded an IT business.
This new Award, created by the NCWIT Entrepreneurial Alliance, was designed to honor and promote women in IT entrepreneurship. It is named in memory of Jeanette Symons: founder of Industrious Kid, Zhone
Technologies, and Ascend Communications.
Anousheh Ansari is Chair, CEO, and Co-founder of Prodea Systems, a
company addressing the challenges of complex digital home and small-business
environments. Prior to founding Prodea Systems, Ms. Ansari served as
Co-founder, Chair, and CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc., which in 2001
successfully merged with Sonus Networks, Inc., in a deal worth approximately
$750M. Ms. Ansari also is the first
woman private explorer in space and the first astronaut of Iranian descent. The
Ansari family provided title sponsorship for the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million
award to inspire the first non-governmental, manned spacecraft, driving the
commercialization of the space industry.
The art (pictured above) for the NCWIT Symons Innovator Award was created through a
harmonious mash-up of high-tech and low-tech. We used Wordle, a Java-based web application,
to create a word cloud using text from interview transcripts of the NCWIT
Entrepreneurial Heroes podcast series,
in which both Anousheh and Jeanette participated. The Wordle design was then
hand-colored and hand-printed on a traditional Platen letterpress by Allison
Bozeman (pictured above) of Bird Dog Press,
who works with post-consumer recycled paper from her wind-powered studio in
Lyons, Colorado. Allison blogged beautifully about the experience of creating the Award art, here.
For guests of the award ceremony on May 11, we've also ccommissioned commemorative wine from Bookcliff Vineyards, a Boulder, Colorado-based
winery that blends tradition with technology. Husband-and-wife team John and Ulla
Mertz bring an engineering background and a PhD in computer science to the
blending of grapes in a Colorado region where wine has been cultivated since
the turn of the century.
We're excited to shine a spotlight on women tech entrepreneurs with the NCWIT Symons Innovator Award, and so pleased with the incredible local artists who helped us make the award a beautiful merger of art and technology.
Tags:
Innovation
NCWIT
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